Manhattan Project agent Safferstein dies at 92

NEW YORK Nathan Safferstein was barely 21 when circumstances suddenly propelled him from his job as a supermarket manager into the stealth world of a counterintelligence agent on the project that produced the atomic bomb.

A customer at the Connecticut market had told her brother – an Army intelligence commander – about a bright young prospect. Soon, paperwork was filled out.

Wartime security being paramount, Safferstein eavesdropped on phone calls of scientists and engineers in Los Alamos, N.M., to make sure no Manhattan Project secrets were leaked, and delivered bomb-making uranium and top-secret messages. He also scrawled his signature on the first atomic bomb, called “Little Boy,” dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, on Aug. 6, 1945. A second bomb leveled Nagasaki on Aug. 9, and Japan surrendered six days later.

Safferstein died Tuesday night at his home in the Bronx after a long illness, his family said. He was 92.

“We had that feeling right from day one that this was the instrument that was going to end this war,” Safferstein said in a 2005 interview conducted by one of his sons, Michael, along with an oral history project moderator. “In my heart, I know that it saved us from the invasion of Japan and millions of casualties that would have come about.”

Safferstein, a native of Bridgeport, Conn., had been working as a supermarket manager in nearby Fairfield when his life took the extraordinary turn. One day, he was ordered to join about 100 other men in New York City's Grand Central Terminal.

“It seemed like a thing out of a Bond movie,” he recalled years later. “We were all dressed in our Adam hats and cover cloth coats. … Ten or 12 agents would drop off: Syracuse, Buffalo, Chicago. The train kept going west.”

Safferstein's group disembarked in New Mexico. Two cars took them to a wooded area where they met Maj. Peer DeSilva, the laboratory's commander.

“He explained to us for the first time this ultra top secret mission, that they were working on a bomb that would be able to dig a hole into the ground some 80 to a hundred feet deep and perhaps 5, 10 miles long. And that from this point on, you are in the Manhattan Project,” Safferstein recalled.

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